Sometimes, when driving somewhere, I can’t help but stare at all the homes Im passing and wonder at the many lives that go on inside them, of all the immense sorrows, hopes and joys contained within such tiny boxes. There are SO many people in the world, and so many are good, decent people who are a privilege to meet, even if coincidentally. But it’s those rare few who become life-long friends, who you can’t imagine NOT having met, who seem drawn to you from out of the faceless crowd as if by the slow tug of gravity–those are the strangers I wonder about as I’m passing by all those countless anonymous homes.
“Peace goes into the making of a poem, as flour goes into the making of bread.”
Pablo Neruda
Doubt sees the obstacles
Faith sees the way
Doubt sees the darkest night
Faith sees the day
Doubt dreads to take a step
Faith soars on high.
Doubt questions ‘who believes?’
Faith answers, ‘I.’
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things only mean beauty.
-Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
I’ve really been meaning to actually write something of my own here. I’ve pretty much for the most part cut and pasted cool ideas, thoughts, inspirations for all my blog entries. There’s most certainly “ripple effect value” (heretofore known as “REV”) found in publishing bits of inspiration…
If you know me, you know I’ve got quite a few opinionated, and often misdirected and uninformed “theories”. I think sometimes I hit things spot on, and often regurgitate some subliminal philosophy that has been embedded in my cranium through years of abnormal conditioning — things that someone already figured out long before me. And often I am sure I’m completely wrong. So I’m a slow learner sometimes???!!
Here are a few topics I’d like to approach one of these days:
1. Relearning practical culture behavior after having spent so many years in a romantic one.
2. The “Notion” theory.
3. The “Third Party Invitation” theory
4. The Science of Music, specifically, what makes a song “good” or “suck”.
5. My inability to remember numbers after my backwards tumble down stairs.
6. etc.
True Love
Current mood: 
nostalgic
I imagine someone to run towards, dashedly jumping over robotically downward rolling barrels (sometimes aflame). At the top of the red steel-girted structure, stands an enraged giant gorilla that hurls more barrels down at me (at regular intervals). The ape seems to have an endless supply of barrels, although I can only see a pile of four. It’s magical. I guess that’s love!
Some say it’s easier if you jump and get the hammer to smash the barrels, but I’m a bit more heroic. So I keep running uphill until I reach an intact ladder (some of them are broken) that will take me to the next magestic floor…and just when she’s within reach, the ape takes her…
One time I saw this guy get to the pie factory level.
(Back when Mr. Gatti’s had an arcade)
At some snapshots in time, music is so “right” that it cuts to the very core of my soul. It inserts this living, glowing, connection to the world, and weaves me into the fabric of universal human emotion — challenging me to become my best self. It heightens my awareness of Deity, and I cannot deny the existence of many songs that have eternally existed spiritually before ever materialized. The whole of a song is greater than the some of its parts, yet it becomes no less magical when dissected into bits and pieces and examined one at a time. I think that aspect is what feeds the musician in me — deconstructing its composition to find the deepest roots of its beginning. Sometimes its a flash that simply makes me want to dance. At other moments it intersects my life path to show me that beautiful things can come from even the hardest experiences. Then there are those songs that serve as containers for my fears and most piercing pains and memories, and it is during those that I can’t decide whether to listen one more time, or to lock them away forever.
© 2008
Jeff Foster